Great Word Adventure, The March 10, 2009

The Great Word Adventure

Howie Mandel is making a name for himself in multimedia without having been in a single Star Trek episode. He’s back as Lil’ Howie in The Great Word Adventure (7th Level, ages 6-9). Eight educational games teach spelling, alphabetizing, synonyms and antonyms, and so on. They are all spins on old concepts – Hangman and word searches both make an appearance – but they usually go a step farther than necessary. Solve a word search, for example, and you are rewarded with a spoken horror story using the words you found. The program is admirably flexible, and even allows you to enter your own vocabulary lists so that its activities will be relevant to your current curriculum. We had some disagreements about The Great Word Adventure here at indelibleNews!; the more mature of us found the voices abrasive, the games derivative, and the humor infantile. The younger game-testers agreed, but weren’t quite so put off by it – they had just finished sitting through Eddie Murphy’s remake of The Nutty Professor, which had even more jokes about stinky things. Howie’s voice has been altered by a computer, which makes him more bearable than usual, and the program certainly puts itself out to promote positive self-image. The range of certificates a child can earn range from “‘A’ Student” to “Smartest Person In the World.”